Bug reports wanted!

Please file a bug for any new issue you find in these Cycle 6 versions that you would like the Xamarin team to investigate. This Alpha release is a chance to help ensure that the final Cycle 6 Stable release will work smoothly with your specific projects and environment.

Installing the Alpha and switching back to Stable

You can install this new Alpha version or switch back to the current Stable version by changing updater channels.

If you prefer, you can also use a special version of the standalone combined Xamarin installer that automatically downloads all of the Alpha packages and installs them. Using this installer is equivalent to switching to the Alpha channel, except that your updater channel preference can be left at "Stable." See the release blog post for the link for Mac and Windows.

Known issue in the standalone installer

Non-public Bug 35425 - [Standalone Alpha installer] Mac-only: on some systems the standalone Alpha installer might crash on the second installation screen during some attempts to run the installer. Workaround: wait approximately 10 seconds on the first screen of the installer before clicking "Continue".

The $HOME/Library/Caches/Xamarin/mtbs is no longer used by the new SSH-based build host (the new directory is under $HOME/Library/Caches/Xamarin/XMA). As a first debugging step, I would make sure both the Mac and the Windows PC are updated to the current Alpha version, then clean the project while XamarinVS is connected to the build host, and then try building again. It would also be safe to try deleting $HOME/Library/Caches/Xamarin/mtbs and $HOME/Library/Caches/Xamarin/XMA. And to be thorough you could also try deleting the bin and obj folders in the project directory on Windows.

EDIT Correction: the $HOME/Library/Caches/Xamarin/mtbs/builds is still used by the new SSH-based build host as the build output location. But as it turns out, that won't alter the "first debugging step" I suggested above.